Setup IIS with URL Rewrite as a reverse proxy for real world apps

Hello CareHart,

You are absolutely correct in pointing out these things in your comment above:
- the old blog (which was on the MSDN blogs side) will sunset soon, so this is why this article has been transitioned here. Unfortunately, the comments section could not be switched over.
- I have also reviewed the section regarding the install requirements, so that it specifies outright that what you need to download and install is ARR rather than just URL Rewrite (so readers can now know what to expect).

As for being able to use IIS as a reverse proxy without ARR, there are several modules that do this for very specific purposes, but they are all third party modules. There is a module that will forward jsp requests to a Tomcat Application server for example.
- what you have to understand is that ARR is two pieces of technology:

1) an HTTP Handler that will take and forward requests and read responses coming out of the backend
2) a UI component that is loaded inside the IIS manager console to allow you to edit the <rules> configuration sections in the web.config in an easy and graphical way.

You could argue that you could build your own managed handler to achieve the same, however ARR is written in native code and will thus outperform any managed handler we could write.